Knut Wicksell, (born Dec. 20, 1851, Stockholm—died May 3, 1926, Stocksund, Swed.) Swedish economist, the foremost in his generation and internationally renowned for his pioneering work in monetary theory.

In Geldzins und Güterpreise (1898; Interest and Prices, 1936) he propounded an explanation of price-level movements by an aggregate demand–supply analysis focussed on the relations between prospective profit and interest rates. This made Wicksell a forerunner of modern monetary theory and anticipated the work of John Maynard Keynes in A Treatise on Money (1930). In Über Wert, Kapital und Rente (1893; Value, Capital and Rent, 1954), Wicksell emerged as an originator of the marginal productivity theory. There and in other studies he also made striking advances in capital theory.

Wicksell was professor at the University of Lund from 1900 to 1916.

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Around the turn of the century, the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell contributed greatly to the understanding of the function of the rate of interest in the mechanism determining income and price-level movements. Assuming an economy initially in full-employment equilibrium, Wicksell analyzed the various ways in which the system might depart from that position because of discrepancies between the...